The goal is not to sin. But if we do sin, we can trust in Jesus and all he has accomplished for us on the cross, provided that we walk with him.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed our study of chapter one of First John. It’s a passage of scripture that I find myself returning to over and over again as a pastor, particularly in counseling situations. It’s one of the most helpful diagnostic and self-diagnostic tools that we have in the Bible. It’s like that intake form that you that you fill out before you go to a doctor’s appointment. It doesn’t contain all the procedures and all the medicine for dealing with our sin problems. We have that throughout all of Scripture. What it does is diagnose our spiritual starting point. Where are you right now? Sitting in front of me in a counseling situation. Right? Is a person who is either walking in the light of Christ and simply struggling to overcome some sin with the Lord’s help, or he’s walking in darkness trying to find an answer, but without the gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit necessary to set him free. And even though those two people are worlds apart spiritually, they can often look remarkably the same on the outside. Same stress, same confusion, same impulse to hide. And First John one is like a checklist for uncovering the truth. If I’m talking to a man who is often angry with his wife and kids, it doesn’t take long to find out if he sees himself as entirely justified for doing this, or if he sees his anger itself as part of the problem. In other words, does he see himself as without sin? Or does he see that his sin is a big part of the problem in his home? The first guy doesn’t understand the gospel. The second guy probably does. The first guy isn’t going to repent. The second guy probably will. The first guy is probably walking in the darkness of sin without forgiveness and new life in Christ. The second guy is probably walking in the light of Christ and needs guidance to apply the gospel that he already knows. The first guy needs to become a new creation. The second guy needs to be the new creation he has already become. And it’s hard to know the difference. I’m sure you’ve had conversations with people where it is difficult to know the difference. It’s because not one of us can diagnose another person’s spiritual state with 100% accuracy. And that’s why I like to open up first, John. I like to open it up. I just like to read the statements and have the person tell me what they think. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. What do you think that means? If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us? How does that hit you? You see what I mean? You can just read these statements, have a great conversation about a person’s spiritual state. You can do a lot of good for somebody simply by helping them to see their own hearts in the light of God’s Word.

John is going to continue to do that for us this morning. Only now in chapter two, he’s going to add something vital. He’s going to explain why confession of sin works. Have you ever wondered why God forgives sins as long as they are confessed? You ever wondered why confession is necessary there? Chapter one, verse nine says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So what is it that happens to our sins when we confess them that allows God to respond to them with forgiveness? And complicating this further, he forgives because he is faithful and just. Do you see that there? That he’s faithful and just when he forgives our sins, faithful means that God will fulfill all of his promises. He’s not going to break his promise. Just here in the sense that it is legally right to forgive. So God is not being unjust. He’s not violating the law. How is that possible? How is that possible? If you commit a crime and you stand before a judge and you’re guilty of that crime, justice requires that judge to punish you even if you say it out loud. He is not legally permitted to say, you know, thanks for letting me know that you’re guilty, I don’t think what you did was that big a deal. You’re free to go. You can’t do that. That judge would be unjust. The judge is bound by the constraints of the law to punish the guilty, even if he is lenient in that punishment he still needs to punish. He cannot simply wipe away the crime. And yet God, without violating his unchanging law, can forgive and wipe away sin. And John is going to explain why that is today. The goal is not to sin. But if we do sin, we can trust in Jesus and all that he has accomplished for us on the cross, provided that we walk with him.

You can go ahead and open your Bibles to First John chapter two. We’re going to be in the first six verses today. We’re going to look at this in three parts. First, what do we have in Christ? And then the two ways that we can be confident that we know Christ. Let’s start with what we have in Christ. My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. Okay, let’s stop briefly there. I know I’m one verse in and Kyle’s already hitting the brakes. I promise this will be a short point. Okay, short point here. John’s about to talk about Grace. Okay. The very next thing is he’s going to start talking about the grace of Jesus Christ. And grace for those who love Jesus, but they struggle with their sins, which is all of us, right? It’s all of us.

But in describing God’s forgiveness, he wants to be sure that we do not mistake God’s grace as a license to continue in sin. He doesn’t want us to work backwards from God’s forgiveness, right? And come up with a faulty reasoning. We say things like, because God is gracious to forgive sinners, I can go on sinning and then just confess to God and receive his forgiveness, right? That’s the reason he wants to avoid. If that’s what’s happening in your mind when you think about God’s grace, you’re in darkness. If that’s what’s happening, when you think about God’s grace, you’re actually in darkness. That is a devious twisting of the gospel. To use God’s grace as a license to sin is reasoning that comes from an unregenerate heart. In fact, it might be more spiritually dangerous than other places you could be, because what that means is you understand the gospel. And you are using it for evil purposes. You get that? You actually have to understand the gospel to get to a place like that. And so he starts this, John starts this little children, I’m writing this so that you don’t sin. That’s my goal in this. He calls us little children because he’s he’s older, he’s wiser, he cares a lot about what happens to the church like a father does for his kids. I almost referred to him this week as Papa John, but I thought that would make us all hungry.

It’s our older, wiser father in Christ. That’s who he is, right? He’s our father in the faith, and he’s writing this letter so that we can get the hooks of sin out of us, not so that we can put them back in. Okay? With that in mind, he continues, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. So here it is. Here’s why confession works. It works because when we confess our sins, that confession doesn’t go directly to the judge. Okay? That confession doesn’t go directly to him. It first goes to our advocate. Our confession of guilt does not go before the Lord unaltered. If it did, a just and faithful God would have no choice but to give us the penalty for our sin, which is eternal death. As Paul said, for the wages of sin is death. But our confession of sin doesn’t go by itself. It first goes to our advocate. It goes to Jesus. An advocate is a person who speaks for us like a lawyer. An advocate makes the appeal on our behalf. So our confession before God is not just our guilt, it is our guilt as communicated through our advocate.

Now, what does that do? What does Jesus add to our confession? Well, if all he did was convey our guilt to the judge without adding anything, he’d be unnecessary. He would. We could directly say that to God. But that’s not what a good advocate does. A good advocate makes a case for you. A good advocate takes all of the facts and makes them into an argument of innocence or leniency, in this case of our sin before God. There’s no true argument for innocence. We aren’t wrongly accused. We are guilty of our sin. But Jesus, as our advocate, doesn’t simply argue for leniency or mercy either. He advocates for forgiveness and a kind of forgiveness that does not violate God’s justice. So how is that possible? How? How is it possible that our confession can pass from our lips through Jesus to God the Father, and result in a forgiveness that both sets us free and does not tarnish God’s faithfulness or violate his justice? I’ll never forget the first time I drank out of a mud puddle. And I know that you’re thinking that I’m about to tell you a story from childhood. This was in my 30s. I was hiking in the Appalachian Mountains with some friends of mine, and we ran out of water. And there weren’t very many sources of water, so we had to refill our bottles with water from a stagnant, dirty creek in the woods. That was basically a mud puddle.

Now that is a recipe for disaster. Except that my buddy Brian had a device that could filter the dirtiest water and make it into clean drinking water, which it did. I was blown away by this. It was some sort of military grade filter. He was very proud that he had it. And the claim of the filter was that you could use it on your own urine and make it into potable water. We did not try that. I would rather die. But what a device. I mean this. It worked. Think about this. Think about this device. If it fails, okay, if it fails. If we can’t turn bacteria-filled water, essentially poison, into drinkable water, we die. But if it can, we live. Jesus is able to hear our confession that will kill us. He can advocate before God the Father and deliver back to us forgiveness that saves us. He is the filter that stands between our sins and a just God. Now how can Jesus be this filter? Well, John explains. First, he is Jesus Christ the righteous. This is the only place in the Bible where we have Jesus identified this way with ‘the righteous’ added to his name. And by adding it to his name, John is saying that Jesus Christ is in a righteous state before the Father, meaning he is without sin. On our own no one else could be described like this.

By our own merits, I cannot be called Kyle Bushre or the righteous. You couldn’t put your name in there either. So Jesus, our advocate, is without sin as he stands before God making his appeal on our behalf. But that doesn’t explain what happens when our sins are confessed to Jesus because he could simply hand our guilt onto the Father and remain righteous himself. What happens here is that Jesus does something with his righteousness. Notice John quickly follows that up in verse two with “He is the propitiation of our sins.” A propitiation is a sacrifice that is acceptable to God, and it’s pleasing to God. It both fulfills the requirement that God demands, and it turns away his anger. It appeases his just wrath, his anger over our sin. In the Old Testament, the sacrificed animals would be burned at the temple, and the aroma was said to rise to God and to please him, which is, of course, a metaphor for appeasing God’s anger over our sin. That is propitiation. John is saying that Jesus death on the cross is the pleasing sacrifice that causes God to set down his just and righteous anger over our sin, because it is an acceptable substitute. God accepts this substitute sacrifice for us. He is the propitiation of our sin. So being righteous on his own, he had no sin to die for, but he is the acceptable sacrifice for us. And so now we have the full mechanism of confession. I know I’m putting this into engineering terms, but often it is helpful to break something down into its parts to understand how it works.

We confess our sin, right? That’s where it starts. We own it. We call ourselves out on what we’ve done. We don’t hide, we don’t excuse. We go before the Lord as open books with honesty about what we’ve done. Now without Christ that sin is condemned and we would take the punishment. Plenty of other religions all around the world have confession as part of what they do, but their confession is without Christ, and so it does nothing but condemn them. Confession on its own brings conviction. That’s justice. But the good news of Christ is our confession is not on its own. Christians confess sin, but at the same time, we trust Jesus. Right? We confess, but we trust at the same time. Jesus Christ receives our confession. He takes our sin on himself. He becomes a substitute sacrifice for us. He becomes a propitiation for us. And this sacrifice fulfills God’s law requirements so that when God declares us righteous He’s not violating his own law because justice has been served. It’s already been served. It’s been served in Jesus. God can forgive sinners without becoming unfaithful to his promises or unjust according to his own law. This is how Christ filters our deadly sin into gracious forgiveness. Writing in the fourth century, church father Augustine of Hippo called Jesus the true mediator. He wrote this: Christ Jesus appeared between mortal sinners and the immortal just one, that he might, by righteousness, cancel the death of justified sinners, which he willed to have in common with them.

So the true mediator uses his righteousness to cancel the debt, creating a category that would be an oxymoron were it not for Jesus: justified sinners. You know another way of saying justified sinners? Innocent guilty people. That’s what it is, innocent guilty people. That does not make sense unless you understand Jesus advocacy work. Apart from Jesus, that does not make sense. It’s an oxymoron. But with Jesus, it makes all the sense in the world. If you know and trust Jesus right now, Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father, saying, she’s mine, he’s mine. I died to pay their debt. I am their righteousness. And this, this gracious forgiveness of sin advocated through Jesus. It’s for everyone. It’s for everyone. John says he’s not just the one who advocates for his sins or for the church’s sins that he’s writing to. He’s the advocate for the whole world. Now, there’s a way of reading that, that makes it sound like John is saying that Jesus has already paid for all the sins of everyone in the world. You could misread this little portion of it universally, but without a doubt, the context dictates that John is not saying everyone’s sins have already been paid for. The whole point of the letter is to help people ensure that they actually do know and have Christ.

So he’s not saying that the whole world has Christ. He’s saying that Christ is for the whole world. Everyone in the world must be saved through the sacrificial work of Christ. Salvation isn’t accomplished for different people in different ways depending on where you live. It’s accomplished in one way by Jesus sacrifice and advocacy for every sinner who would be saved. So if you are to be saved, it will have to be through Jesus, the one who can take your sins. This is a statement about missions here at the end. Church, every person you know needs the sacrifice of Jesus on their behalf to be forgiven. That’s what they need. They need to know him, and they need to have confidence that they know him. Here’s how you can have confidence. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. Sounds kind of like last week, doesn’t it? John is returning to his same line of reasoning from chapter one. And by this we know that we have come to know him. This is how you know you know, is what he’s saying here. Again, it’s all in the grammar here. The Bible rewards very careful reading.

How do you know that you have already come to know Jesus? In other words, how can you have confidence that you actually do know Jesus? Instead of just saying that you know Jesus and fooling even yourself? I can’t tell you the number of people that I have crossed paths with through my life that say they know Jesus but do not at all appear to. There’s no evidence of it. John is saying there’s a way of knowing. There’s a way of knowing. You don’t have to guess. You don’t have to wallow in doubt. You also cannot stand on a lie. Here’s how you know you know. You obey his commandments. If you truly know Jesus and his sacrifice covers your sins, there will be an eagerness inside of you to not only to know the commandments and the instructions of God’s Word. There will be an eagerness to obey them. Your life will be marked by evident obedience. I say evident obedience because it will be observable. It’ll be observable by you. It will be observable by the people around you. It will serve as a piece of evidence. You won’t live two ways. You won’t. You won’t have this, I lived this way for the Christians to see in my life, and then I also live a different way for myself. Remember, John wants his readers to really know themselves. So this is helpful to you to really know where you are spiritually.

He’s saying that you’ll know because you’ll be able to see what your mind thinks. You’re going to be able to observe what your heart wants, what your hands do, what your mouth speaks, and all of these thoughts and all of these actions will be conformed more and more every day to the commandments that God has given us in His Word. Let me pause here just for a minute and speak to the guy or the girl sitting here this morning who knows deep down inside that there is not this eagerness for obedience to Jesus, and it’s just not there inside of you. Look, I get it. I completely understand. I came to faith in Christ when I was 20 years old. I remember being a person who thought he was fine, claiming to be a Christian and then just living for myself however I liked. I remember that. I know how easily this gospel can be assumed. You can just assume it. You can just say, yeah, it covers me. I think so, yeah. That’s how I, you know, you can just assume it. Just say you’re a Christian, be better than most people and then live however you want. That’s enough. Right? Please listen to me this morning, if that’s you. Listen to me, as one who used to be in your shoes, true gospel transformation in your heart comes with a longing and a striving to be obedient to Jesus.

It’s not just different belief. It’s a different life that you live. Now. It’s important to understand and to remember that this obedience to Christ’s commandments includes repentance for our sins. Okay, that’s part of the obedience. The goal is perfection. The goal is to live perfectly. Perfect obedience to Christ. In Jesus sermon on the Mount, he sets the standard. He says, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. But his commandments include repentance. In Matthew chapter four, verse 17, Jesus went about preaching. Matthew says, repent and believe in the gospel. Repent and believe in the gospel. So the way he summarizes all of Jesus ministry is that it includes repentance and believing together. John started this whole passage here by saying, don’t sin, but when you do sin, confess your sin, right? He assumes the failure you’re striving for perfection. But you assume that there will be times when you fail in this. And obedience to Jesus is striving for that perfection while resting in forgiveness. Okay, we’re striving, but we’re also resting. Until we are made new, there will be always a gap between where we are and where we are heading. There will always be a gap there. You’ll be closing the gap with the Holy Spirit’s work in your life. There’ll be victories, right? But there will always be a gap until we’re with Jesus. I recently read a great quote by Trevin Wax. He wrote an article and he says this.

I love this quote. Hypocrisy isn’t the gap between Christian ideals and the Christian life. Hypocrisy is the refusal to acknowledge that gap. He’s right. If you are in a state of forgiveness, or as John puts it in verse five, the love of God is perfected in you, then you will be eager to keep God’s commandments and ready to repent when you fail. That phrase, the love of God is perfected in you, it’s a little bit awkward to us, but it’s beautiful when you think about it. This is God’s love. Complete. Perfect. Finished. It is not being perfected. It is perfected. You’re not building God’s love up as you are obedient. The obedience is just the evidence of God’s perfected love for you. So God’s love for us in Christ is not a half-done project. Our growth in Christ is still incomplete, but his love for us is not incomplete. Are your children earning and building up their love that you have for them through the completion of chores? Is that how it works at your house? Is your spouse slowly gaining your love by accomplishing goals and completing tasks? I hope not. I hope that’s not how it works in your house. That’s going to be a pretty dysfunctional home if you see it that way. And if you do, it’s probably because you don’t yet know the unconditional love of God that we have through the finished work of Christ.

Jesus commandments are not a path to earning God’s love. They are the good instructions of a God who is already loving us perfectly because of what Jesus has done for us. Not everyone has that love, but that love is offered to everyone. And you know you have it if you joyously obey Jesus. Here’s another way of saying that it’s our second way of having confidence. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. If you’re beginning to suspect that John likes to say very similar things in slightly different ways, with different shades of meaning, you are right. We are going to see this throughout this letter. He returns to the same topics over and over again, and I can see two reasons for doing that. First, the repetition brings emphasis and focus. And repetition is really important for learning things. We hear the same things over and over and we learn them. But the second with each restatement, John gives us a little bit different perspective on whatever it is he’s talking about. Notice the slight change in focus here. See, before he said, here’s how you know him. Now he’s saying, here’s how you know you are in him. So the first is a focus on our relationship with Christ to know him. The second is on whether we’re covered by Christ’s propitiation and are spiritually connected to him, that we are in him.

And they go together. You can’t have one without the other, but they are slightly different perspectives of the same spiritual state. John calls this abiding. Okay. He gets this word from Jesus. He gets the idea from Jesus himself. Abide means to remain connected. Jesus uses the branches of a vine in John chapter 15 to describe this. He said, if we’re connected to him, it’ll be evident because we will remain connected to him. And that sounds a little bit redundant, but it’s not really. Said another way, if you’re really covered by Christ’s sacrifice, if you’re transformed in heart, if you’re saved by God’s forgiveness, then that will be evident throughout your life. You will remain. You will abide in that truth. If you’re tethered to Jesus, your life is going to look more and more like Jesus. Okay? If you have him, you will become more like him. And that means that you’ll sit at Jesus feet, in a sense, and you will be his disciple. You’ll want to learn from him. You’ll want your life to match his life. So what did he do? Well, he did a lot of things, didn’t he? But let’s name a few. He hated sin. Jesus had a hatred for sin. He refused to give in to temptation. He did so perfectly. We have not done that perfectly. But we strive to shun every temptation, to root out every clinging sin within us.

He loved the Father. He really loved the Father. His every impulse was to listen to the Father and make choices accordingly. John 15:10, listen to this, I want you to listen to John 15:10, Jesus said to his disciples, if you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his. He showed us what really, truly loving God looks like in your life. If you’re in Christ, you’re going to follow him and you’re going to match your choices as closely as you can to the way he walked. Because Jesus isn’t just our Savior, he’s our role model for life. He’s the one we look to, to know how to live. Church, I can’t stress enough how important it is for those of us who claim Christ to set our course to follow him as closely as we possibly can. There’s an app on my phone. It’s called Find My. In theory, it’s supposed to help you find your phone and your lost items and lots of things. But let’s be honest. Let’s be honest, parents. We know what this app should be called. It’s the stalk my kid app. We all know it. That’s how we use it. That’s 100% of its use. Where are they? Haven’t they left yet? What are they doing over there? They said they were going to leave before 10:00, and they’re still there.

And I don’t know why they’re still there. Does it say that they’re in a lake? Are they in a lake? I better call them. Are you in a lake? Right? You moms are the worst about this too. You are the worst. Dads, dads don’t really want this information unless there’s a problem. And then we need the information. But moms though, my goodness. My wife has two of these kinds of apps on her phone. She’s got that one, and she’s got another one that will give her an alert when one of our kids starts riding in a car. I can’t imagine why I would want that information. What? Why would you want that? Anyway, I will say there is one way that this app has completely improved my life, and that’s when traveling to sporting events. When Sammy would ride to the cities to play baseball with his team, play a game with his team, it used to be that I would have to look up the address and then hope with every fiber of my being, that they did not move that game from that place to another place at the last minute. And I have driven to so many fields where baseball is not happening. I have asked so many people I do not know, do you know where this game is being played? Can you point me in the right direction? Now, usually I will be in the vicinity, right? It’s not like they said it would be in Apple Valley and now it’s in Iowa or something like that.

It’s usually about 15 minutes away or so. But not anymore. Not anymore. Because now, now thanks to the marvel of technological advancement, I don’t have to make a map to where I think I’m supposed to be. I can make a map to my kid. Straight to him. Now, last week the app messed up and I went to the wrong field anyway. My wife being a good wife. Rachel said that my illustration is now ruined. I’m using it anyway. Okay, let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good illustration here. It’s a flawed picture of an infallible reality. Friends, you don’t need to guess or wonder or approximate where God would have you go. You don’t have to wonder what your life should look like. You can just set a course for Jesus. You can just put your life on a trajectory toward Christ. A life lived well in light of Christ’s sacrifice is going to look like him. It’s going to look like Jesus. So you need to study Jesus. You need to listen to his word. You need to let it change you. And as you do this, it will confirm to you more and more strongly every day that you are indeed in him, that you have him, that you know him, that you are covered by his grace and you are secure in the forgiveness of your sins because your father says you are. Let’s pray.

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